Summary:

With a commitment to offering a wide range of plans for both small and big businesses, inMotion Hosting is perfectly attractive if you need anything from shared hosting for your startup to managed dedicated servers for enterprise level websites. Keep reading our inMotion Hosting Review to find out if they might be the right solution for your hosting needs.

Founded in 2001 in Los Angeles, inMotion Hosting strives to offer diverse and affordable hosting packages for all customers, without sacrificing customer support or reliability as some providers tend to do. Due to their focus on offering hosting plans intended for businesses, some of their shared hosting pricing can seem somewhat higher, but it’s important to keep in mind that this also includes unlimited bandwidth and storage space.

With free SSDs, site migration, backups, and a site builder included, inMotion Hosting certainly has a lot to offer in terms of value. Add in a 90 day money back guarantee and we can easily say they greatly impressed us with their offerings.

inMotion Hosting Pricing & Plans

As a hosting provider mainly focusing on hosting for businesses, inMotion has several hosting options available, with shared,VPS, dedicated, reseller and WordPress hosting available to fit the needs of your site. Free site migration and no setup fees means that getting started is quick, easy and with no extra cost!

It’s important to note that as is usually the case with hosting providers these days, rates will be different based on the length of your plan. inMotion unfortunately does not offer month to month pricing for their shared hosting plans, with the minimum term being one year. They do however, offer various discounts (around 50%) depending on the length of your plan.

Shared hosting starts at $3.99 a month (12 month term, $8.99 a month prior to 55% discount) for their Launch plan, which includes unlimited storage and bandwidth, while also giving you up to the ability to host up to two websites with two databases. inMotion also provides $250 in advertising credits, along with a free Yellow Pages business listing for all plans.

If you need the additional power and control of a VPS, inMotion offers VPS plans starting at $39.99 a month for their basic plan, although this drops to $34.99 with a six month term and even further to $29.99 a month when signing up for a 12 month term. inMotion makes a concentrated effort to provide scalability and options by including optional root access and Burstable RAM (starting at 4 GB) to ensure your site can handle sudden jumps in traffic. inMotion’s VPS plans come with a free domain (for six and 12 month plans only), a full CPanel license, and snapshots to protect your site from data loss.

Dedicated servers can be purchased starting at $149.99 a month (for the first term only), which gives you 10 TB of bandwidth, while “commercial class” dedicated servers are also available starting at $479.99 a month. While some of the commercial class dedicated server plans do offer good value for expanding businesses, we recommend checking out WebHostingBuzz or A2 Hosting instead if you need an affordable dedicated server.

Managed hosting is also available if you don’t want to deal with the intricacies of your server, with rates starting at $40 an hour for inMotion to handle all the technical details of your site.

inMotion Hosting Video Review

inMotion Hosting Speed and Reliability

inMotion Hosting values their reputation as a fast and reliable host very seriously, as evidenced by their quality of hardware as well as 24/7 server monitoring. With four Tier 1 ISP providers running at all times, connection redundancy is also guaranteed in case of catastrophic failure to make sure your site stays up and data keeps flowing.

It goes without saying that inMotion’s SSD drives are another big reason for success. Increasing the speed of your site with SSDs will not only lead to increased traffic, but increased revenue in the long run as well.

To see just how fast inMotion’s servers really are, we conducted a 10 MB test download from their Washington, D.C. data center, resulting in a favorable 648 KB/s download speed from our Budapest, Hungary office location.

inMotion also has a feature called “Max Speed Zone”, which essentially means that if your within a certain range of the data center, your site can get up to 6x faster speeds. Additionally, CloudFlare CDN can also be installed on your server, although we were disappointed to learn that this isn’t quite as easy as enabling it from the comfort of CPanel, rather requiring some manual work from the user’s side.

inMotion Hosting’s SLA gives a 99.9% up time guarantee for shared hosting packages that credits you with a month of service if you experience any downtime over their guarantee. Dedicated plans come with an impressive 99.999% up time guarantee, which is backed up by their use of Smart Routing technology combined with BGP multi-homing and redundant switching network.

inMotion Hosting Interface and Security

We all know the importance of have a user-friendly interface and luckily inMotion does not disappoint in this department. CPanel is included in all shared and VPS hosting plans, giving you the comfort and ease of the world’s most popular hosting management tool.

We really liked that you can choose from a CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop and more) to come preinstalled during the checkout process, although these can also be handled later on from within CPanel’s included Softaculous script installer.

inMotion is also an official partner of BoldGrid, a powerful site building tool that comes loaded with numerous free themes to choose from. As BoldGrid is based on WordPress, you will have a reliable and responsive site built on the world’s most popular CMS.

With web security becoming increasingly important in the digital age, inMotion takes your site’s data very seriously. SSH access, secure IMAP e-mail access, hotlink protection and custom cron jobs are available, while inMotion house their servers in Category A PCI compliant data centers. These data centers are monitored 24/7 by physical security, along with multiple battery and diesel power sources in case of power failure.

inMotion Hosting backups are done automatically every 36 hours, but they also allow users to create their own backups at any time, free of charge. The only negative feature we discovered concerning backups was that you are only allowed to restore a backup for free once every four months, after which inMotion charges a $49 fee for each backup.

Shared hosting plans come included with a free shared SSL certificate, although if you need the further benefits of having a dedicated SSL, inMotion provides Comodo 256-bit encrypted SSL certificates at $99 a year. While this will also require purchasing a Dedicated IP ($2 a month), inMotion will waive this fee if you purchase your SSL from them.

inMotion Hosting Customer Service

inMotion has a commitment to providing quality customer service without cutting a lot of the corners that bigger companies are known for doing. They offer 24/7 phone, e-mail and live chat support, as well as a extensive knowledge base and community FAQ section.

We really liked that in addition to a dedicated phone line, they also offer customer support via Skype, a useful option for people who need to urgently speak with a representative but lack access to a telephone. We gave their live chat a test run at 7 AM EST to see what kind of response time we would get, and while we were disappointed to see a nearly one hour wait time, the availability at such an early hour is still impressive.

Social media is full or praise and appreciation regarding inMotion’s customer support, further confirming in our minds that inMotion Hosting really does provide an excellent service to their customers.

If you feel unsatisfied at any point with inMotion’s offering, you can take comfort in know that they have one of the industry’s highest money back guarantees at 90 days for shared and VPS hosting packages, while a 30 day guarantee exists for dedicated hosting plans.

inMotion Hosting Review Conclusion

I liked

Free migration and site builder

SSD storage

“Max Speed Zone” technology

Skype option for customer support

I wasn’t so sure about

Only 1 free backup every four months

Lack of monthly pricing for shared plans

I hated

Nothing

We can confidently say that inMotion is one of the top hosts we’ve reviewed so far. With a focus and commitment to providing hosting solutions for businesses of all sizes, we do believe that inMotion does succeed in realizing this.

Whether the free site migration, site builder, or SSDs prove to be attractive for your website, you can also take comfort in inMotion’s excellent customer support and reliable and fast hardware. As we mentioned earlier, a 90 day money back guarantee for shared and VPS hosting plans is available, so give them a no-risk try today!

Written by Thomas UjjThomas Ujj is an expat/traveler and IT enthusiast with a passion for IT security and privacy. When he isn’t planning his next trip, he likes to take time to practice his Italian cooking as well as religiously watching Italian football team AS Roma.